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Here at ASD Labs some of us are blue, others are gray… but we all love a little green! This is why we are now accepting donations of no less than $1,000,000 to purchase one of these eco-friendly homes. We’re calling it “Buy us a House and We’ll Be Your Slaves For a Day!” charity. Check out their website [by clicking the photograph] and let us know if you’re interested in being a sponsor.

Check this out – http://www.google.com/microsoft

We have recently had a chance to help implement an osCommerce solution. This solution is great because it’s free and open-source. It has an abundance of ecommerce plugins which were written for it. It has a very large and devoted following, including both users and code contributors. BUT…here is the problem.

Whether it is because of all the different contributors or because the original creators chose not to adhere to any code formatting standards; the code is very difficult to debug. Also, vital mistakes were made. Like for example the use of global variables to store sensitive information. Another thing that really bugged me is that the creators were obviously skilled enough to create a folder full of classes which they then use throughout the application..BUT – and this is a ‘BIG BUT’… Why wasn’t the whole application built on classes?

Anyhow enough with the ranting. I leave you all with this final thought: Open-source is a great idea and we have seen some amazing outcomes [i.e. the PHP project] but things like sloppy code, lack of structure, structure which is too complicated and other quality control problems will serve as the final nail in the coffin to any programming project, but with open-source, you will not have the money to go back and pay someone to fix it.

Happy Coding!

I have recently ran into a little bit of a problem on one of our recent projects. I was using javascript/php to submit a form’s contents but to increase efficiency I was using a single form process script. The dilemma was that I had several forms and I needed to distinguish between them. So basically I needed the opposite of getElementById()!

Here is a small and very simple code sample that I used to get the form’s id.


//Get the element object and access element's id

var formElements = document.getElementsByTagName("form");
var formId = formElements[0].id;


Now this worked for me because I only had one form on each of the pages that was accessing this script. If you have additional forms or other elements of who’s id you need to access then you can take this simple example and add logic to it which would loop through and identify the element that you’re looking for.

Welcome to ASD Labs’ blog!

We are very pleased that you took the time to look us up and in return we will try to provide you with a unique collection of information regarding a wide range of topics which are all centralized and in one place. This blog went live in late Summer 2007, and will be evolving over the next few months, so bear with us if the content seems a little thin. And don’t forget to let us know if you find any bugs.